


No speaking!

by Scoby



Series: Reylo feast [9]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon Universe, Crack, Crack Treated Seriously, During Canon, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Dyad Cheats in Pantomime, Games, Holding Hands, Inappropriate Use of the Force, The Resistance Ships It, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-04
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:27:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27825265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scoby/pseuds/Scoby
Summary: “X-wing! Y-wing! TIE fighter! Freighter! Shuttle! Dreadnought! Cruiser!” Finn keeps shooting guesses in sync with Poe changing poses.Frustrated, Poe slips into saying: “No, stupid, I mean what all those…”“No speaking!” Rey protests.He zips his mouth and rethinks his strategy. Grinning at Finn, he points at Rey and Ben. Finn’s eyes light up.“SHIP!!!”
Relationships: Poe Dameron & Finn & Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: Reylo feast [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1779877
Comments: 3
Kudos: 35





	No speaking!

The interior of Tantive IV is a mess. Ever since establishing the base on Ajan Kloss, everyone in the Resistance has been too busy to do there anything else but sleep and leave things lying around in random places with high hopes that time for a cleaning day will eventually come. Finn and Rey scan the space, trying to make a strategy.

“We’re overthinking this”, Finn finally sighs. “Let’s just start there.”

He points at a corner with radiation shield fabric swelling out of drawers. Rey nods in agreement and they get to work. A couple of hours pass and they get dozens of items sorted out, some on their places, some in a growing pile of things to either repurpose or get rid of. Still, the progress seems minor considering the full scheme of the mess.

“Looks excellent!”

They have not noticed when Poe has appeared behind them, looking at their work with a wide and careless grin, arms behind his back.

“What happened to: ‘clean if you have to but don’t touch any of my stuff or I’ll bounce you to the orbit’?” Finn asks.

Rey is equally surprised. Poe seems like a different person compared to the snappy one who left them after lunch for a meeting with the General.

“Let’s say I have good news.”

He observes the effect of his hint on their tired faces for a while before breaking it out:

“We got a donation of new ships!”

“That great”, Rey says, mind still half-occupied by the cleaning project.

“But that’s not all.” Poe takes his arms from behind his back and shows that he is holding a small transparent box with something cylindrical and blue-tinted beige inside. “See what they sent with the ships: one confection of the finest chocolate from the Core Worlds! Just let me read the label.”

He clears his throat and reads in his best seductive voice: “A layered mixture of rich bantha milk chocolate and praline seasoned with the first spring buds of blueblossom and phytochrosite salt. This constellation will send your tastebuds to a paradise beyond words.”

The description makes both Finn and Rey spontaneously hold out their hands towards the box. But Poe jerks it back and holds it protectively against his chest.

“Actually, the General told me to share it with the two of you.”

“Share it!?” Finn blurts out in shock.

“She must be joking”, Rey says. She cannot imagine how it could be even close to satisfying to eat only one third of a confection with that kind of label.

“Let’s fight for it then.” Finn takes off his jacket and lays it down on a chair that they have just freed from below a mountain of clothes.

“But fair, no using of the Force”, he adds with a side-eyed look at Rey.

Poe lifts up his palm as a gesture to stop him, though. “No, as a Vice General, I can’t afford anyone getting injured.”

“Well, let’s gamble then,” Rey suggests.

“Ok, which game?”

Rey blanks at Poe’s question, since she has very little experience of games of any kind, especially ones that can be converted into a gamble. All her time on Jakku was mostly a lonely fight for survival. But Finn has an answer ready in a heartbeat:

“Pantomime!”

He is almost sure that he will win. They used to play it a lot in the Stormtrooper Corps to kill time during long transports. They were not allowed to remove any piece of armour, so he had to learn to be very good at expressing and reading subtle concepts with the whole body.

Whenever Captain Phasma played along, nobody else had a chance to win, as she had a highly refined technique that helped her get across even the most difficult abstract words. But she was often occupied in meetings with higher-ups, and in those occasions, Finn has won several times. And once, he even beat Captain Phasma herself.

He had been on a fierce streak, acting words that offered just the right level of challenge and feeling like he had a real connection to his comrades who guessed every word almost instantly. After his turn, Phasma had started equally smoothly, but half-way through her time, she had completely blanked on the word ‘love’.

She had stood still for several seconds, arms hanging helplessly by her side, trying desperately to come up with any kind of gesture that would hint at the right direction. Eventually, she formed a shape with her gloved hands that remotely resembled a heart. Still, nobody guessed and she had to make plenty of other vague gestures until somebody finally blurted it out when her time was almost over already.

Everyone had laughed at her and cheered at Finn. Afterwards, Phasma was so pissed that she made Finn do an extra round of cleaning the ‘freshers. But beating her was definitely worth it.

“What’s pantomime?” Rey stares blankly at Finn's excited face.

“You have to make others guess a word without speaking, only acting it out. When somebody guesses what you're acting, you get a point. And it’s not allowed to cheat by not guessing others’ words on purpose. Anyone who doesn’t seriously participate in guessing is disqualified. We just need…”

He scans around the space in search of something where to write words. The technician of his team in the First Order had coded for them an elegant system that generated words randomly and made them appear inside the performer’s helmet. Now they have no access to anything that sophisticated, but among all this clutter, they might be able to find…

“…pen and paper. Or anything where we can write words and hide them so that they are only picked up one by one. Let’s search.”

Rey and Poe join him in opening boxes and closets and digging under piles of debris.

“What are you looking for?”

Rey freezes when she hears Ben’s voice behind her. He is standing right next to a set of low drawers that Finn is opening and closing, so that his right leg is infused with Finn’s upper body.

“Just – pen and paper.” Rey shrugs and continues going through the overflowing contents of a tall closet.

After a moment, she feels Ben’s presence creeping closer to her. She finds a wrench on the shelf and squeezes it in her fist as a potential make-shift weapon as she turns around to face him. But he makes no sign of attacking her, only hands a pile of light yellow paper and a fancy-looking pen towards her. When she does not react, he nudges them closer.

“I'm not going to take a pen from you”, she whipers. “Who knows if it’s…”

“Rey, it’s certainly not poisoned.”

When she still eyes him suspiciously, he lifts his free hand up to his mouth and grips the tip of the middle finger of his glove between his teeth so that he can slide his hand out of the glove. Then, he presses the tip of his pinky to the pen so that a little dot of black ink comes out on the skin.

“See, no poison in the ink. Just take them. You can even keep them. I’ve got plenty.”

Hesitantly, Rey takes the pen and the papers, avoiding contact with his hand.

“Plenty?” she repeats. “In that case, can I have two more pens?”

“Sure.” Ben puts his glove back on, turns to pick up two more pens from thin air and hands them to her. “But this one I’d like to get back.”

Rey understands, as one of the pens looks even fancier. The tip makes an elegant curve where the ink is supposed to be dosed. She nods at Ben and shifts her attention back to Finn and Poe.

They are in the process of exchanging an amused look, and Poe is clearly forming soundless words with his mouth. As soon as they notice that she is looking, though, he closes his mouth and they smile at her like nothing happened.

“Here.” Rey passes each of them a few papers and a pen, keeping the fanciest one to herself. “What do we do now?”

“Everyone has to write words", Finn says. "Any words that come to your mind that could be fun to perform. It can be anything, objects or animals or persons or abstract concepts. Not too hard but not too easy either. Remember, you or anybody else might get your word so you want to make it possible but challenging.”

They all write in silence until each has filled at least one paper.

“Then, rip each word on its own slip, fold and put all of them here.”

Finn empties a trashcan in a corner they have just cleaned up and positions it between them. Everyone folds their words carefully and drops them in the can for Finn to scramble. Finally, they are ready to begin.

“Let's play for four rounds. The winner of each round is the one who gets the most points", Finn explains. "The confection goes to the one with the most wins in four rounds, which is going to be me.”

But he notices quickly that he is not going to win as easily as he thought. Poe is right on his level. He is less nuanced with using his body but makes up for it with versatile facial expressions. At the first round, Finn gets nine points and Poe eight.

Rey, on the other hand, is hopeless. Nothing comes to her mind when she tries to think about how to act out the words. During her first turn, the only word she gets explained is ‘broadleaf’, and it only happens after she uses several seconds to come up with the obvious gesture of lifting her arms and swaying like a tree. Poe just happens to be lucky to guess that her tree is a broadleaf.

The second round begins by Finn scoring ten points and Poe eleven. When Rey’s turn comes, she opens her first paper slip and wastes again plenty of seconds on thinking.

“Come on, you can do it”, Finn encourages. “Don’t overthink it, just do what first comes to your mind.”

But Rey’s mind is blank. When she finally moves, she just makes a vague gesture with her hand from mid-air upwards.

“Lightsaber.”

“Yes!” Rey screams victoriously.

But it is neither Poe nor Finn who guessed it. Ben has sat down in the air next to them. With a faint, satisfied smile, he nods at her to continue. With shaky hands, she opens the next slip and curves her arms into an odd shape around her.

“Errr… snowball”, Poe tries.

“Happabore”, Ben says.

“That’s right!”

“Was it _snowball_?” Poe asks suspiciously.

“No… I mean, he…” She looks at Ben and suddenly realises what is going on.

 _You’re reading those from my head_ , she tells him through the Force. _That’s cheat…_ Her thought cuts short when she realises the possibility.

Finn only gives her a knowing smile when the timer pings to signal that her time is up. Next, Finn and Poe execute another perfect round of pantomime. But Poe happens to get mostly abstract and difficult words and finishes with only eight points while Finn scores ten – half of those from easy everyday objects.

When Rey’s turn is about to start, she holds out her hand to the side. She is heavily suspecting that her friends already know who is there and there is no need to be shy about it.

“I want Ben to play, too.”

Finn and Poe look at each other and then at the approximate direction where they expect him to be.

“Fine with me”, Poe says. “But how would it work when we can't see him?”

“You'll see if we just hold hands.”

She extends her hand closer to Ben. Finally, he takes it in his gloved one and appears next to her. His first question is:

“What are we playing for?”

“For this.” Poe lifts the chocolate confection box up for him to see.

If he is impressed, he shows nothing of it on his face.

“No cheating, then”, Finn reminds. “Rey’s time starts three, two, one, now.”

Rey opens the paper slips with one hand and makes clumsy expressions of her words using mostly her free arm. But this time she scores eleven points, thanks to Ben who plays along perfectly.

He keeps it skilfully secret that he can see the correct answers as soon as they appear in Rey’s head when she reads them. He gives her a few seconds time to try to act them in her own way and often makes one or two fake guesses first.

“Your turn”, Finn tells Ben after Rey’s time ends. “Three, two, one, now.”

Rey is delighted to find out that somebody else sucks in pantomime as much as she does. After Ben has opened his first slip, he starts doing an incomprehensible little circle in the air with his free hand.

Rey probes the word easily from the top of his mind. Her plan is to guess it just slightly slower than he guessed hers, so that their trick will not end up undermining her own chances to win. She opens her mouth to say her first fake guess when Finn shouts:

“Detonator!”

“Yes!”

Ben opens his next slip and makes some kind of weird movements of shaking his fingers above his shoulder.

“Chewbacca!” Poe guesses.

“Right!”

They continue guessing right without Rey ever getting a chance to play time. Suspicious, she tunes deeper into the Force to find out what is really happening. When Ben finishes his time with twelve points, she frowns at him.

_Cheater! Don’t think I wouldn’t notice how you’re pushing the answers to their minds._

_Cheater? I helped you cheat, too. If you tell on me, I’m going to tell on you_ , he silently bargains.

Rey grits her teeth. She still does not have a single win, while all the others are even, just one win away from the confection. She will have to win the fourth and final round.

Finn starts the fourth round with an array of challenging words. He makes it relatively fast through ‘art’ and ‘anger’, but ‘trade federation’ costs him more than ten precious seconds. He finishes with seven points and curses under his breath.

Poe hammers quickly through ‘jogan fruit’, ‘sonic wrench’, ‘General Hux’, ‘Jakku’, ‘astromech droid’ and ‘happiness’, but with his seventh slip, he gets in trouble. He spreads his body first in the shape of an X and sways. Then he does the same with his legs together. Then with his arms up at straight angles on his sides. And in several other stances.

“X-wing! Y-wing! TIE fighter! Freighter! Shuttle! Dreadnought! Cruiser!” Finn keeps shooting guesses in sync with Poe changing poses.

Frustrated, Poe slips into saying: “No, stupid, I mean what all those…”

“No words!” Rey protests.

He zips his mouth and rethinks his strategy. Grinning at Finn, he points at Rey and Ben. Finn’s eyes light up.

“Ship!!!”

“Yes!”

That is all he has time for. Rey should be starting her turn, but she can only gape at Poe and say:

“You’re the best pilot of the Resistance but the only way you managed to act ‘ship’ was by pointing at _us_?”

Poe shrugs and Rey turns to ask Finn: “And that was how you guessed? Do you both mean ‘ship’ in terms of…?”

“Don’t blame us!” Finn raises his hands in surrender. “We weren’t even the ones who started it, I think… Just one thing led to another until everyone around the base was talking about you two.”

“And what does everyone say about us?” Ben asks, making both Poe and Finn squirm.

“Somebody’s gotta tell them”, Finn whispers to Poe.

“Fine, you do it then”, he whispers back.

Finn clears his throat. “Just that you should do a favour for the galaxy and bang already.”

Ben and Rey both flush, which gives Poe a dose of satisfied courage.

“Or can either of you say that you haven’t thought about doing it?”

They turn slowly to look at each other, but neither of them shakes their head or says no.

“There, you see”, Finn says. “I mean, of course it doesn’t have to happen immediately. In fact, I hope you do talk first enough to clarify things between you and so forth. But it’s just pretty obvious how Rey almost every day talks with somebody we can't see and is all flushed and smiling afterwards…”

“But Finn, don’t you think it’s problematic that he’s…” Rey looks down at Ben’s gloved hand in hers. “…with the First Order. You’ve always said that leaving it was the right thing to do.”

“That's still what I recommend", he says looking straight at Ben. "We just… you see, naturally we all understand that there might be a time period that you’d both have to play along with the First Order before you can find your own path. But since we know you, Rey, and are convinced that you’re nonconvertible to the Dark Side, we have no doubts that no harm would come out of it. In fact, maybe there’s a chance that you could influence the Order from the inside. If that’s your choice, I mean. Or maybe Ky- Ben wants to join the Resistance instead. Or you two just disappear in the Outer Rim for a few years. Or you make it a full-blown public relationship blast that serves as a beacon of reconciliation to the whole galaxy. It’s up to you. That’s how at least I ship you: it doesn’t need to look a certain way. Of course I’d love to have you around, but it’s not my choice to make.”

Poe and Finn wait for a moment to observe the effect, but Rey and Ben seem both too puzzled for any more progress to happen just now.

“Your turn?” Poe nudges the trashbin towards Rey.

“Oh, yes, my turn, I’ll do it.”

The time starts ticking and she strives to focus. She has decided to use Ben’s dirty strategy of pushing answers to her friends’ minds, but at this state, it is a lot more difficult than she thought. She manages simple Jedi mind tricks already fluently, but only in situations when she can really put all her focus on the push through the Force. Now, she has to keep on acting at the same time and her mind is already distracted, thinking about all the new possibilities for a relationship with Ben that have just opened up to her.

Ben is merciful enough to give her seven correct guesses so that she ends up even with Finn and Poe. But then comes his own turn and he makes them guess nine words correctly. That makes him the winner of two of the four rounds. With a heavy heart, Poe hands him the prize.

“If you idiots would get it faster that two negotiating hands means ‘trade federation’, we wouldn’t have lost this to the First Order, too.” Finn looks longingly after the beige cylinder in its transparent box against Ben’s large, black hand.

“If you’d recognise a ‘ship’ faster when I give you eight alternatives, this wouldn’t have happened either”, Poe snarks.

“What do you even do with it?” Rey asks, unable to part her eyes from the beautifully glossy chocolate surface that looks so close to her now, even though it has already traveled across the galaxy when it passed to Ben's hand. “You should have no problem buying loads of those whenever you like.”

He puts the box down somewhere on his side and places his freed hand against his other one so that he is holding Rey’s hand between both of his. With the confection out of her view, she lifts her gaze up to meet his eyes.

“I’m planning to give it to someone. Come with me tomorrow to Warlentta for a concert, and you’ll find out to whom.”

“How do I know if that's an ambush or a date?”

“It's a date, I promise. Would you like to come?”

Rey glances aside at his friends but they have stripped their faces into complete neutrality. Just like Finn said, no matter how enthusiastic they might be for her internally, they still want her to make her own decision. She clasps her free hand around the back of Ben’s so that their hands form one bundle of warmth and promise and says:

“Yes.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this, leave kudos/comment and check out the same gang playing in-universe spin the bottle [here](http://www.archiveofourown.org/works/24526909)


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